# Abdul Wasey (w453y)

> Network and firmware engineer from NITK Surathkal, India. Works on
> secure-boot firmware for Qualcomm and OpenWrt platforms, IPv6 deployment,
> high-availability virtualization, and open-source tooling.
> Site: https://w453y.me · Email: awasey8905@gmail.com

## Identity

- Name: Abdul Wasey
- Handle: w453y (consistent across GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, Reddit, Telegram)
- Location: Mangalore, Karnataka, India (IST, UTC+5:30)
- Education: B.Tech, National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, Nov 2022 to May 2026, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
- Current role: Firmware Engineer at Quantum Networks (https://www.qntmnet.com), Dec 2025 to present, remote

## Experience

### Firmware Engineer, Quantum Networks (Dec 2025 to present)
- FIT image verification and verified boot in U-Boot for OpenWrt-based AP platforms; authenticated kernel/rootfs validation across dual-image NOR+NAND layouts.
- Complete Qualcomm IPQ60xx secure-boot workflow: OEM key provisioning, signed-image generation, QFPROM fuse payloads, boot-chain verification from PBL to Linux.
- Debugged Qualcomm Sectools, MBN v6 metadata, soc_vers handling; fixed secure-boot failures on IPQ6010/IPQ6018.
- Hardened OpenWrt/QSDK firmware-signing pipeline: RSA-PSS signing, SHA-384 fuse hashing, automated sec.dat generation, signed recovery images.
- Low-level recovery: U-Boot, EDL/Sahara, Firehose, serial-console tracing, SPI-NOR analysis, staged flashing.

### Intern, Tata Communications, Pune (May to Jul 2025)
- Multi-link WAN switching and aggregation engine with seamless failover across uplinks.
- Clustered virtualization environment on enterprise rack servers with redundant SAN storage and multipath I/O.
- Performance-isolated networking with dedicated interfaces and VLANs; validated with structured failover testing.

### Systems Engineer and Lead, IRIS NITK (May 2023 to May 2026)
- JWT auth via custom-compiled NGINX module integrated with Rails.
- Zabbix + Grafana monitoring with Discord alerting (SSL expiry, outages, anomalies).
- Dockerized GitLab Enterprise migration with automated NAS backups.
- Zero-downtime migration of 40+ containers and 15+ VMs from legacy Proxmox/Nutanix to a high-availability Proxmox cluster.

### Research Intern, NITK Surathkal (Apr to Jul 2024, supervisor: Prof. Mohit P. Tahiliani)
- Full NAC testbed: PacketFence, OPNsense, 802.1X, VLAN segmentation, dynamic device onboarding.

## Projects

- Self-Hosted Infrastructure Platform: personal two-node Proxmox VE cluster with ZFS and shared block storage over multipath iSCSI, hosting 30+ services. OPNsense at the edge (VLANs, firewall, WireGuard), a single containerized NGINX reverse proxy with automated Let's Encrypt TLS fronting all services (Matrix Synapse, Mailcow, Immich, Vaultwarden, Guacamole, Stirling-PDF, this portfolio), layered DNS with local and public Pi-hole instances behind dnsdist (DoT/DoH, split-horizon), a Jellyfin-based media automation stack, Portainer, code-server, local LLM inference, and game servers.
- IPv6 Deployment at NITK (APNIC-funded): dual-stack SLAAC + DHCPv6 rollout on campus VLANs; DHCPv6 snooping, rogue-RA mitigation, RDNSS fixes for Android clients. https://apnic.foundation/projects/migrating-nitk-surathkal-campus-network-to-ipv6/
- Staging-Server (IRIS NITK): Django app deploying Dockerized apps to isolated staging environments with dynamic subdomains, live log viewer, browser terminal (xterm.js). https://github.com/IRIS-NITK/Staging-Server
- ngx-http-auth-jwt-gateway: centralized JWT auth gateway for NGINX with Google OAuth 2.0. https://github.com/w453y/ngx-http-auth-jwt-gateway
- tg-archiver: containerized Telegram media archiver (Telethon/MTProto) with resumable, deduplicated parallel downloads. https://github.com/w453y/tg-archiver
- personal-portfolio: this website, built with React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Node.js/Express backend, Docker + NGINX. https://github.com/w453y/personal-portfolio

## Open-source contributions

- TeslaGov/ngx-http-auth-jwt-module: PR #152 merged in v2.4.0: runtime-variable support for auth_jwt_enabled (conditional JWT enforcement, geo/map module integration).
- Proxmox VE, Bugzilla #6224: root-caused GUI "Disks" hang from blocking SMART queries on USB SSDs; contributed diagnostics to upstream timeout patch review.

## Talks

- "Securing IPv6 Networks with Firewalls" (IIESOC / CSE / COSH-NITK workshop, 2024)
- "WAN Aggregation using OpenMPTCProuter (OMR)" (FOSS United Mangalore, Oct 2024)
- "Introduction to Self-Hosting with Free and Open Source Tools" (FOSS United Mangalore, Aug 2025)
- "Open Source Monitoring in Action" (FOSS United Mangalore, Oct 2025)

## Community

- Founder and moderator of r/dockerCE, a community-run Docker subreddit.
- Writes technical guides on Reddit as u/w453y, including converting a clustered Proxmox node to standalone without reinstalling and setting up DNS over TLS for Pi-hole with stunnel. Active in r/Proxmox, r/selfhosted, r/homelab, and r/pihole.
- Keybase-verified identity linking GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News accounts: https://keybase.io/w453y

## Certifications

- Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate (2023)
- Oracle OCI Certified Architect Associate (2026)
- Oracle OCI Certified DevOps Professional (2026)

## Skills

Networking (IPv4/IPv6, routing, VLANs, NAC, 802.1X, MPTCP), firmware (OpenWrt, U-Boot, Qualcomm IPQ60xx, secure boot), virtualization (Proxmox VE, VMware, Nutanix), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI), IaC & automation (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, GitHub Actions), monitoring (Zabbix, Grafana, Prometheus, LibreNMS), web infra (NGINX, Apache), languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Lua, Shell), databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis).

## Links

- Website: https://w453y.me
- GitHub: https://github.com/w453y
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/w453y
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/w453y
- Telegram: https://t.me/w453y
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/w453y
- Keybase: https://keybase.io/w453y
- Email: awasey8905@gmail.com